Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The latest version of Google Maps for mobile phones has a new feature called "my location". Instead of having to enter your location, Google Maps is able to find it. If your phone has GPS support the location detection should be very good, but even if there's no GPS, Google Maps can approximate your location. "The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it's not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average)." To find your location on the map, just press 0 and look for a blue dot.

Google says that this feature should work on most "Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices", but it doesn't work in Sony Ericsson K750i, so this claim is questionable.

To get the new version (2.0), go to http://google.com/gmm on your mobile device. It's still in beta, so don't expect it to be flawless.

There's a new search experiment at Google Labs, but this time not everyone's invited. The new experiment lets you personalize your search experience by directly influencing the order of search results.

Each search result has two buttons: "like it" and "don't like it". The first button moves the search result at the top of the page and you'll see it there every time you search for the same keywords (Google adds an orange marker so you can distinguish it from the algorithmic results). The "don't like it" button removes the search result, but only for the current query. There's also an option to add new pages that don't appear in the list of search results: "at the bottom of the search results you can give the address of a page that's relevant to your search. When you search for these same keyword(s) the page you've suggested will appear at the top with this orange marker."

All in all, you can add a list of favorites for the current query and remove the irrelevant pages. This is especially useful if you know you'll search again for the same keywords because the next time you do that the list of search results promoted at the top will certainly save you time. Google doesn't mention if you action influence the overall quality of search results, but it's likely that they only influence your search results.

Other similar experiments from the past included the option to add better search results, reorder the results and remove search results.

Google Maps has finally added the missing piece from personalized maps: collaboration. If you create a map in the "My Maps" section, you can now invite people to collaborate or allow anyone to edit the map like in a wiki.

"The My Maps feature of Google Maps lets people create maps to share their hobbies and expertise with the world. For example, a surfing enthusiast could map out their favorite surf spots or a surfing club could plot all the best beaches in Southern California. Now imagine if all the surfers around the globe worked together, leveraging their combined knowledge to create a single map of the best surf spots worldwide, applying the power of wiki-style collaboration to cartography," suggests Google Lat-Long blog.

And if you don't feel like creating a new map from scratches, you can now import it from a KML or GeoRSS file. To find one, search in Google Maps and select the "community maps" option at the bottom of the standard search results.

Then you can invite collaborators and send them a message. The dialog is very similar to the one from Google Docs, except that you can transform a map into a wiki. This would've been very useful for the San Diego Fire Map "that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations", but it's also an interesting way to share your knowledge with other people.

As an example of collaborative map, here's a map where you can add a placemark for your location and maybe something about you. Just click on "Edit", find your location on the map, right-click and choose "Add a placemark".

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

An interesting article from last week talked about Google's growing interest for creating platforms and containers. "Hoping to become the platform for developers and users to create original content, [Google's Derek] Callow said that Google is now creating base products that would allow users and developers to build applications on top of these web platforms."

An example of base product is iGoogle that lets you add mini-web application to a web page. Google made it easy for developers to build gadgets, but it didn't manage to enable users to build their own gadgets. iGoogle Gadget Creator is a very basic tool and should be transformed into a powerful wizard that lets you add content from the web.

Another great base product is Google Maps, which provides a great framework for integrating geographical content. Developers used Google Maps API to create a lot of mash-ups and Google wanted to add these mash-ups back to Google Maps. Mapplets and personalized maps were the products that made this possible. Unlike iGoogle, it's much easier to bring your favorite content to Google Maps and this platform will generate a lot of interesting things when Google will transform personalized maps into wikis, by enabling collaborative editing.

I think we'll see many web pages created on top of Google's base products as they become great ways to gather and organize information. Here's a great story from Jess Lee, product manager at Google Maps:

On Tuesday [October 23], we saw a huge increase in traffic on Google Maps. The traffic spike was so large that our servers thought they were being DoS attacked. It turned out that the additional traffic was due to hundreds of thousands of people constantly refreshing maps about the terrible wildfires in Southern California. Several news outlets and individuals had used the My Maps feature to create maps that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations. (...) What's truly amazing and surprising to me about all of this is that the most authoritative source of information on the wildfire was produced by a tiny broadcasting station like KPBS and that this information was disseminated online using consumer-facing tools like My Maps and Twitter. I would have expected a government agency or a large traditional media outlet like CNN to have been the primary source of fire maps, but a lot of them just linked to the KPBS map in their articles. In fact, Calfires.com (the official fire website maintained by the governor's office) simply embedded the KPBS map on their homepage using Google Maps' embed feature.

If you like Google Suggest, the feature that auto-completes your queries based on Google's aggregated data, you can now add it to the standard search pages by joining the keyword suggestions experiment, one of the five experiments from the search section of Google Labs.

As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.

Google Suggest is also available by adding &complete=1 to a Google search URL (e.g.: [Google]), in Firefox's search box and in Google Toolbar. Some Asian versions of Google show keyword suggestions by default: China, Korea, India.

This year both Ask.com and Yahoo introduced these suggestions as a built-in component of the search experience, hoping to guide users when typing a query. Yahoo's search assistant shows up as an extension of the search box if you type some letters from a word and then stop for a couple of seconds. Even if you can disable it, many people found it annoying and unnecessary. "Get rid of any of the so-called assistants. They take up space on the screen, slow down processes and insult everyone's [intelligence]." is just an example of negative feedback.

Sometimes search suggestions save you time and help you enter difficult words like deoxyribonucleic, in other cases the suggested query contains the answer to your question. But are they useful and good enough to bring them to Google's search pages?

While iGoogle already offers 11 themes to customize the homepage, there's no option to create your own theme. Custom iGoogle Skins is an inline gadget that lets you choose between more than 70 user-created themes (some of them are illustrated in this gallery) or create a custom theme.

An interesting new feature from the latest version of the gadget adds rules for displaying themes: you can choose to show a theme only when it rains, on a certain day of the week or if your IP matches a certain value. Google's themes are already rule-based, but you can't switch between them automatically. For example, this gadget lets you have different themes for a tab if you load iGoogle at home or at work (assuming the IP addresses are static).

Some interesting personalization rules for the feature could include changing the theme depending on your mood, your Google Talk status, your Google Calendar agenda the tab's title or the latest news.

This is probably the year of Google's most important product launches. Even if they're much rarer than last year, they are strategically important (personalization, universal search, machine translation, the mobile platform, social gadgets).

Wall Street Journal reports that Google plans to launch a service for storing files. Of course, we all know about GDrive, an internal Google project, and Google's goal to store store 100% of user's data. "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)," mentioned Google in some leaked annotations from a presentation.

But WSJ's article could mean that GDrive's launch is close. "Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said."

The article doesn't mention the amount of free storage that will be offered, but Google will probably use the same strategy from Gmail and Picasa Web: some free storage that should be enough for most users and paid storage for everyone else.

"Google is hoping to distinguish itself from existing online storage services partly by simplifying the process for transferring and opening files. Along with a Web-based interface, Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter."

The idea of mapping the online storage as an external drive is not new and you can already do this with tools like Gmail Drive or services like .Mac or Box.net. But Google really needs an application for uploading more files at once to Google Docs or Gmail, so the GDrive uploader could be useful to add files to a shared area, directly accessible from all Google services. Now it's difficult to upload files because there are so many different Google services that let you upload different kinds of files (documents, photos, videos etc.)

"Google is hoping the new storage service will help tie together some of its other services through a single search box, says one of the people familiar with the matter. So a user might be able to conduct a single search by keywords to find his own privately stored files, regardless of whether they're accessed through Picasa, Docs or a software program running on the user's computer."

There's a new tab in Google Maps: "terrain". The view combines street maps with visual information about terrains. Elevation data is not limited to geographic features like mountains, but it's also displayed for buildings.

The satellite view adds data from the hybrid view (street names, city names, roads), but you have the option to hide it.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Google's image search engine has always returned many strange results, but universal search made this problem more visible. For some queries, Google shows three images at the top (or at the bottom) of the main search results pages. One of these queries is [RSS icon], which should obviously return the orange icon for feeds. But it also returns something else...

The irony is that the inappropriate picture was included in a post from 2005 that criticized Google's image search engine. Here's the full post [contains a bigger version of the image]:

I wanted to add an RSS icon to my blog, so I turned to the trusty Google images search: RSS. And what do I get. Certainly not the little orange RSS box (though if this really was the RSS icon, maybe people other than serious geeks would use the technology).

This goes to show that Google image search hasn't improved so much since then. Just because a page contains "RSS icon" twice in the neighborhood of an image doesn't mean the image shows an RSS icon.

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is one of the very few things that stand out on Google's minimalistic homepage. It automatically takes you to the first search result and it's helpful for navigational queries, when there's a single good result (e.g.: [Yahoo Mail], [download Opera]). The option was included in a slightly altered manner in Google Toolbar and Firefox: browse by name instead of typing URLs in the address bar.

I'm Feeling Lucky:http://google.com/search?btnI=1&q=yahoo+mail

Browse by Name:http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=mailhttp://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=yahoo+mail

"The reason it's called 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' is of course that's a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you're going to try that with one go," tried to explain Sergey Brin.

"You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people," said Marissa Mayer.

Even if only 1% from Google's searches bypass the search results page and go straight to the top result, Google will keep the strange button on the homepage as it has become a part of its brand. Probably the last time someone told you to click the button was to show you a Google Bomb: Go to Google, type in "miserable failure" and then press the "I'm feeling lucky" button (don't try, it won't work anymore). Or maybe you've seen the button in Picasa or iGoogle.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that the button is Google's number one UI mistake: "I understand this was a clever little joke in the early days of Google-- hey, look at us, we're a search engine that actually works! -- but is it really necessary to carry this clever little joke forward ten years and display it on the monitors of millions of web users every day? We get it already. Google is awesomely effective."

"I'm Feeling Lucky" boxers (limited edition)

Google will remove the button when you won't have to feel lucky to get the best results every time and when the list of links will be replaced with an actual answer.

Ajaxian talks about an interesting way to use Google Gears for sites that don't necessarily integrate with Google's toolkit for offline applications: inject code using Greasemonkey. An article shows how you can save a number of Wikipedia articles for offline use, without depending on your browser's cache.

Sites with a lot of static information -- Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email -- would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you're a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn't do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there's altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don't wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters' precious bandwidth/server power!

Here's the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Gresemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on "cache page" and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

Google's current navigation bar was added in May as a solution for the growing list of Google products that lacked visibility and were difficult to find. The bar added a drop-down that includes less popular services like Reader and Patent Search, while replacing the famous More page. It was placed at the top of the page, detaching it from the search box, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Google's bar has two configurations that depend on the context:* a search mode (visible in most services and on the homepage) - shows the most important search services* an apps mode (you can see it in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Picasa Web and Groups) - shows the most popular web apps for communication and collaboration

Because the space is limited, Google can't afford to include too many links, so here's the structure of a bar:- 5 links that point to the most important services of the current mode (search or apps). If the active service is included among those services, the link is replaced with a bold text.- a transitional link to the most popular service of the inactive configuration (Web search or Gmail).- a drop-down that lists the other 14 services alphabetically.

If the services don't have descriptive names, the bar includes alternative titles: "Photos" for Picasa Web Albums and "Documents" for Google Docs.

It's interesting to note that Google includes 11 search services, 8 apps and Google Labs (it's not clear whether Google Groups is more important for search or for its community features).

While Google's selection is mostly based on the popularity of its services, users may want to see different configurations. Let's say my favorite Google services are: Blog search, Scholar, Blogger, Google Reader, YouTube and Google Project Hosting. That means I always have to click on the "more" link or even to search for YouTube and Project Hosting, because they're not included.

What I'd like to see is an option to choose the services that are displayed in the navigation bar and a task-oriented search box that will look like the Quick Search Box from Google Desktop and is already partially implemented at Google Code. The search box should have auto-complete and should let you search for product names, descriptions and important tasks for each service. For example, you could enter: [compose mail] or [contacts] for Gmail, [create event] or [agenda] for Calendar, [upload document] for Google Docs, [referrals] or [stats] for Analytics etc. The results should prioritize the services you used the most and Google should send you directly to the right page (Gmail's contact page, for example).

To facilitate the discovery of features, the task-based search box could be added to each service and act as a humanized command line that doesn't require you to know parameters and command names.

Besides the standard Google News page, there are other ways to explore the news automatically clustered and ranked by Google.

The image version of Google News shows pictures related to the most important news and lets you explore a gallery of images that illustrate a news. This is a great way to find the key elements from a news at a glance, without even reading the text.

Newsmap is a brilliant visualization for the headlines that reflects the importance of a news. Everything is displayed in a single page that is automatically updated. "Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator."

Google News Cloud displays the most important keywords from today's news in a tag cloud. When you hover over a keyword, other related keywords are highlighted.

Google Trends checks how frequently a word was mentioned in the article indexed by Google News. The results are displayed at the bottom of a chart in the "news reference volume" section.

Buzztracker shows the relation between news and locations. Every day you can see the top cities mentioned in the news on a map. There's also an archive that goes back to 2004. Baghdad, Washington, Gaza, New York seem to be the most frequently mentioned cities.

An interesting way to explore the evolution of a person, company, idea or event is to use the timeline view from Google News Archive. Even if most articles require paid subscriptions, the snippets provided by Google are really helpful.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Google's image search engine has always returned many strange results, but universal search made this problem more visible. For some queries, Google shows three images at the top (or at the bottom) of the main search results pages. One of these queries is [RSS icon], which should obviously return the orange icon for feeds. But it also returns something else...

The irony is that the inappropriate picture was included in a post from 2005 that criticized Google's image search engine. Here's the full post [contains a bigger version of the image]:

I wanted to add an RSS icon to my blog, so I turned to the trusty Google images search: RSS. And what do I get. Certainly not the little orange RSS box (though if this really was the RSS icon, maybe people other than serious geeks would use the technology).

This goes to show that Google image search hasn't improved so much since then. Just because a page contains "RSS icon" twice in the neighborhood of an image doesn't mean the image shows an RSS icon.

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is one of the very few things that stand out on Google's minimalistic homepage. It automatically takes you to the first search result and it's helpful for navigational queries, when there's a single good result (e.g.: [Yahoo Mail], [download Opera]). The option was included in a slightly altered manner in Google Toolbar and Firefox: browse by name instead of typing URLs in the address bar.

I'm Feeling Lucky:http://google.com/search?btnI=1&q=yahoo+mail

Browse by Name:http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=mailhttp://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=yahoo+mail

"The reason it's called 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' is of course that's a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you're going to try that with one go," tried to explain Sergey Brin.

"You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people," said Marissa Mayer.

Even if only 1% from Google's searches bypass the search results page and go straight to the top result, Google will keep the strange button on the homepage as it has become a part of its brand. Probably the last time someone told you to click the button was to show you a Google Bomb: Go to Google, type in "miserable failure" and then press the "I'm feeling lucky" button (don't try, it won't work anymore). Or maybe you've seen the button in Picasa or iGoogle.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that the button is Google's number one UI mistake: "I understand this was a clever little joke in the early days of Google-- hey, look at us, we're a search engine that actually works! -- but is it really necessary to carry this clever little joke forward ten years and display it on the monitors of millions of web users every day? We get it already. Google is awesomely effective."

"I'm Feeling Lucky" boxers (limited edition)

Google will remove the button when you won't have to feel lucky to get the best results every time and when the list of links will be replaced with an actual answer.

As you browse the web, you find interesting web pages or just useful information that may help you later on. For some web pages you may want to get alerts if there's any change in the future, for others you're happy with the static content.

It would be nice to have a simple option for all these actions. You could just bookmark a page and choose from a list of options:

* save content (you could save the entire page or just some clips)* get updates (dynamically create gadgets by selecting some information from a page that is likely to change - weather, news; subscribe to feeds or to newsletters; get all the changes of a page)* share with others

The bookmarking application could be integrated with your web history (that could be saved locally or online), could determine the web sites you visit frequently and automatically bookmark them. From your bookmarks and clips, you could create web pages and share them with other people.

The simple bookmarks could combine in a single interface Google Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Google Notebook, Google Alerts, iGoogle, Dapper and other applications.

Google Maps has a new feature that lets you fix inaccurate addresses for local businesses, even if you're not the owner. You just have to click on "edit" in the info window and choose a new location. If you move the marker more than 200 meters away, the change will need to be reviewed before going live. There's also a history of previous changes and an option to go back to the original location.

"You might be worried about people monkeying with markers. Fear not, we've thought of that. Whenever you find a recently-moved address or business, you'll see a "Show original" link you can click to see where the marker was originally. If it's in the wrong place, just move it to the right one," explains Google LatLong Blog.

This also works for locations of addresses and landmarks, but only in the US, Australia and New Zealand. More about the new feature here.

Last month when Google bought Jaiku, people wondered why Google preferred the micro-blogging service to Twitter, which is much more popular. Jonathan Mulholland thinks that the answer lies in Jaiku's unique ability to combine micro-blogging with user's location.

"An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a 'status aware address book', and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability ( - General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc)."

Because his mobile phone is able to broadcast the location automatically (even if it's not very precise), the user posts more than a message. The text can be connected to his location and create a list of preferences for each place you frequently visit.

"Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability. Imagine walking down the high street and having your mobile phone pop up with a Google notification telling you that Heroes DVD box sets were 20% off at HMV today, or that a new Indian restaurant had just opened in that part of town. (...) It seems obvious that Jaiku is destined to become an integral part of the Android platform over the next year," thinks Jonathan Mulholland.

Android includes an API for location-based services that allows "software to obtain the phone's current location. This includes location obtained from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation, but it's not limited to that." If the phone is not GPS-enabled, Google could use Jaiku's technology.

Google already offers local targeting for ads, but this could be much more useful when you're using a mobile phone. And if the ads are truly relevant and unintrusive (maybe as a part of a more complex service of local recommendations), people might actually like them.

The first update for Google Presentations doesn't include the export to PowerPoint format, as one might expected. Instead we get some minor improvements for managing and customizing the slides.

Now you can select more than one slide at a time: press Ctrl while selecting disparate slides and Shift for continous selections. The slides can be moved using drag&drop and copied by selecting the options from the contextual menu.

While there's still no option for custom themes, you can change the background by uploading an image or selecting a color. Right-click on a slide and select "Change theme". Google recommends to use 800x600 images or at least images with an aspect ratio of 4:3.

For the end, here's a simple way to import a PPT attachment from Gmail to Google Docs: right-click on the "View as slideshow" link, copy the link location, paste it in the address bar and replace "disp=vgp&view=att" with "disp=attd&view=wtatt". When Google Presentations becomes more powerful, this tip will probably be unnecessary.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

"Google Phone" turned out to be a mobile platform and not a phone optimized for running Google apps. "Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation," announced Andy Rubin on the Google Blog. Android was launched as part of the Open Handset Alliance, an organization that has a lot of other important members: Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Intel, NVIDIA, LG, Motorola, eBay, Nuance Communications and more.

The goal: "through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform". The SDK will be available on November 12 and the first devices based on Android should be launched next year.

"Through Android, developers, wireless operators and handset manufacturers will be better positioned to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. (...) The Android platform will be made available under one of the most progressive, developer-friendly open-source licenses, which gives mobile operators and device manufacturers significant freedom and flexibility to design products. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space. And consumers worldwide will have access to less expensive mobile devices that feature more compelling services, rich Internet applications and easier-to-use interfaces -- ultimately creating a superior mobile experience," explains the press release.

Android is based on the Linux Kernel and has some interesting particularities. "Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. (...) Android breaks down the barriers to building new and innovative applications. For example, a developer can combine information from the web with data on an individual's mobile phone -- such as the user's contacts, calendar, or geographic location -- to provide a more relevant user experience. With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect. (...) Android provides access to a wide range of useful libraries and tools that can be used to build rich applications. For example, Android enables developers to obtain the location of the device, and allow devices to communicate with one another enabling rich peer-to-peer social applications."

It seems that Andy Rubin didn't forget the principles used when he built Sidekick: a great platform for developers, always connected to the network and that doesn't cost too much. In less than a week, Google announced two important initiatives that contain the word "open": OpenSocial and now Open Phone Alliance, but Android seems much more open and more meaningful for developers and users.

In a conference call that followed the announcement, Eric Schmidt said that an Android phone "with a real browser, won't need customized programs and websites, so it'll be easy for devs to support the phone by supporting any desktop browser". Apparently, the browser is a very strong point of the phone. By bringing the web closer to mobile phones, Google could become even more important in people's lives of and could increase its reach.

RarePlay has an article about deriving useful social data from mails and transforming sites like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail into implicit social networks.

An interesting experiment Yahoo (and similarly Google) is undertaking internally is called "Friend Finder". Friend Finder analyzes a user's email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections based on incoming/outgoing traffic and the frequency and speed in which two parties respond to each other.

Xobni already does this for Outlook: it clusters contacts based on how frequent they appear in the same CC field and other factors.

Gmail also has a list of frequently mailed contacts based on an affinity score. Maybe it can expand the list with more information about the contacts that have the most starred messages, the longest conversations, the fastest replies or the most forwards.

Here are some new iGoogle themes that will probably added soon to the customization dialog (the descriptions are from Google). To add one of these themes to the active tab, go to iGoogle and type in the address bar the JavaScript code you'll find below. Then click on "Save" in "Select a Theme For This Tab", without selecting any theme. The first theme (Solar System) changes daily, while the rest of them change depending on the time of the day.

Solar System: For those of you who like to space out, this theme will help you do so. Enjoy a different scene from our solar system on your iGoogle homepage, each day of the week.

Go to iGoogle and type in the address bar: javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/planets.xml');

Autumn: The leaves are falling and the air is crisp. It's fall, and the raccoons are enjoying every bit of it. Follow them through the day as they tackle the onslaught of leaves and prepare for a barbecue feast.

Go to iGoogle and type in the address bar: javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/autumn.xml');

Hong Kong: It's the Hong Kong skyline in soft beautiful colors. Add this lively cosmopolitan city to your homepage and watch as the day goes by.

Go to iGoogle and type in the address bar: javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/hongkong.xml');

J. R.: Introducing J.R., the friendly giant monster who makes his home on your iGoogle homepage. Follow him throughout the day as he keeps himself busy going about his daily chores and hanging out with his friends.

Go to iGoogle and type in the address bar: javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/jr.xml');

Aja Tiger: From the cave looking out, follow the Aja Tiger through the day and the seasons. This Korean theme is a fun and friendly one for your iGoogle homepage.

Go to iGoogle and type in the address bar: javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/tiger.xml');

Another day of autumn, another bloated new version of Yahoo Messenger. Very few people remember that Google launched back in 2005 an instant messenger that promised to enhance people's lives. The Windows application with a non-standard interface and the strange installer that didn't give you any option.

Google Talk's silence gave birth to a Flashy gadget that can be embedded into any web page, even if the only effect is that the page loads slower. The gadget took over Google Talk's homepage and even added some features that weren't available in the stagnant desktop client.

10 months have passed since the last Google Talk release and people expect to see all the features from the bloated Yahoo Messenger in the same simple interface. The promised integration with AIM, Skype and the "traditional phone systems" should also be added.

For the moment, the original Google Talk got back the homepage and has yet to add an entry in the "What's new" page. Despite its acute lack of features, Google Talk is almost perfect because it didn't make too many mistakes.

Probably the biggest mistake was to promise things that couldn't be accomplished in a timely manner.

"Your #1 feature request was file transfer, which we're happy to have launched. Look for updates to the form, and make sure to vote again! Now, we're off to the next version. I can't tell you what your #2 and 3 suggestions were, but I do know that they're on the way." (Google Talk Blog - August 21, 2006)

"Just as exciting are our plans to explore interoperability between Google Talk and Skype, making it easier for our users to chat with one another. This is just another step in our commitment to interoperability via open, industry standards." (Google Talk Blog - August 28, 2006)

The second mistake was the lack of communication and that's hard to understand, especially if you consider that Google Talk is a communication app. It's actually "a Google approach to instant communications".

Microsoft finally allows people to create @live.com email accounts, now that most of the Windows Live applications are out of beta. Because there aren't too many registered accounts and you can create accounts at many international domains, it's likely you'll find a good email address.

An interesting new features lets you link a main Windows Live account with other secondary accounts and use a single login to access all your accounts. At the top of the page, next to your email address, there's an arrow that hides a list of your linked accounts.

Windows Live IDs are the key that unlocks many web applications from Microsoft and you can get one when you install the Windows Live suite, a Google Pack without third-party software. As we could see in the previous article about Windows Live, Microsoft's strategy is to deliver a unified package that combines its best software with its online extensions. Microsoft pitches it as a Windows upgrade and a simple link from Vista or from Windows Update is enough to capture a big audience. "With Windows Live, you'll get software and services that make what you can do on your PC and the Web just that much more amazing. Think of it as the power of Windows combined with the limitless possibility of the Internet." (my emphasis) That's probably the reason why some web apps from Microsoft work better in Internet Explorer: they're not supposed to work optimally on any platform and any browser, their purpose is to enhance the default Windows experience.

Gmail's new version broke many plug-ins and Greasemonkey scripts, so Google decided to come up with a long-term solution: an API for Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey is an integral part of the web experience for many experienced users. Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place [my note: Aaron Boodman], another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail [my note: Mihai Parparita], and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs) [my note: Mark Pilgrim].

Instead, we would like to provide a little help to make such scripts more robust. Instead of finding elements by XPath or DOM traversal, this API provides accessor methods for getting common screen elements. Instead of forcing you to monkey-patch (ahem) our internal functions, this API provides callbacks to call your functions when specific events occur.

This API is experimental. New features and code changes may still cause Greasemonkey scripts to break.

The first Greasemonkey script that uses this API is Mihai Parparita's Macro, which brings additional keyboard shortcuts to Gmail, and the rest of his already famous scripts should also be ported to Gmail's new codebase. The API is not meant to expose messages, contacts or settings, it's more like a convenient way to customize Gmail's interface and functionality without relying too much on the implementation's details.

OK, maybe my speculation about the integration between Google Talk and other IM networks didn't have a strong foundation, but at least we know that Google Talk and AIM will interoperate in the near future. Here are some screenshots from a newer version of Gmail, still in testing (Gmail is one of the interfaces that can be used to access Google Talk):

Two years ago, when Google bought 5% of AOL, the agreement included "enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met".

YouTube launched a multi-video uploader that lets you upload videos that are up to 10 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size. You need to install a software (Windows-only, for now), but you'll upload videos from your browser.

The advantages are that you can upload bigger files, you can select more than one video (even all the videos from a folder) and it's allowed to leave the page while the videos are uploaded. The disadvantages: YouTube installs an application that runs in the background and automatically launches at startup. Youtubeuploader.exe uses a lot of memory even when you're not uploading videos to YouTube and also launches Google Updater.

Google Video has a similar tool, but it doesn't work from a browser and you can't enter the metadata before uploading your videos. On the other hand, Google Video doesn't mention any limits for your videos.

A blog post from March 2006 explains why YouTube decided to limit uploads to short videos. "We've gotten a fair amount of emails lately about the new 10 minute limit we've implemented for video uploads. For those of you not familiar with this change, we've always had a 100MB file limit for uploads. We also recently implemented a 10 minute length limit. This change won't impact the vast majority of our users. We know that over 99% of videos uploaded are already under 10 mins, and we also know that most of our users only watch videos that are under about 3 minutes in length. (...) We poked around the system a bit and found that these longer videos were more likely to be copyrighted videos from tv shows and movies than the shorter videos posted."

On a related note, YouTube introduced more categories from which you can select when flagging videos. "When users flag a video, it is reviewed by real-life humans at YouTube who check to see if the video should be removed, age-restricted or left alone," explains YouTube. I think it's hard to decide when a video infringes copyright or YouTube's policies, but it could be an interesting exercise to launch a new YouTube section that contains flagged videos, where "trusted" users could vote if the videos deserve to be removed.

Google uses many signals to rank search results and, in some cases, it filters some of them based on your location, device or preferences. Here are some ways to disable these filters or to create custom filters.

1. Google automatically expands some queries and also includes results that contain different morphological forms or related words. If you search for [av], Google will highlight antivirus and anti-virus. To prevent this, add + in front of the word: [+av]. This is also useful if a certain keyword is very important and must be included in each search result.

2. Google filters duplicate search results, so if you want to find a better estimation for the number of search results add &filter=0 at the end of Google's URL. This parameter disables the following two filters:

* Duplicate Content — If multiple documents contain the same information, then only the most relevant document of that set is included in your search results.

* Host Crowding — If there are many search results from the same site, Google may not show all the results from that site or may show the results lower in the ranking than they otherwise would have been.

3. Here are two useful URLs for Google's homepage:

* http://www.google.com/webhp - if Google redirects you to the mobile version, but you want the standard homepage, this URL bypasses the detection

* http://www.google.com/ncr - if Google redirects you to a localized version, based on your IP address or your browser's settings, you can go to the global version using this URL (or by clicking on "Google.com in English").

4. To introduce a local bias, add the gl parameter to Google's search results URL. For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=roma&gl=it shows the results for [Roma], but gives better rankings to pages related to Italy.

5. If you don't like Google's personalized results you can log out from your Google account, disable the Web History service or turn off the personalization bias by adding &pws=0 to Google's URL. Note that the parameter is not persistent and it only works for the current search.

6. To restrict your search to the high-quality (?) web sites included in the Open Directory Project, you can append &cat=gwd/Top to Google's URL or perform your search at Google Directory.

7. Find the right custom search engine for your query and enter your query there. A good custom search engine restricts the search space to a number of authoritative sites from a domain.

8. Use the site: operator to restrict your search to a TLD (like .edu), domain, subdomain or even a pattern. For example, to restrict your search to YouTube pages that contain videos, try: [site:youtube.com/watch/v?=].

9. Search only the web pages and sites linked from a page using Google Co-op's on-the-fly feature. Use the "try it out" option.

10. A version of Google which identifies and prioritizes "search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users" is Accessible Web Search.

Other filters are available in the advanced search page: restrict the search results to pages written in a language, from a certain country, to non-adult sites, or to pages licensed using a flavor of Creative Commons.

Both Microsoft and Google added widgets for translating your web page into another language. The feature was already available at BabelFish, but the site makes a major faux-pas by using flags to represent languages.

Microsoft's widget (the second one from the screenshot) uses a translation system from Systran and offers 25 language pairs. The widget seems to work only in Internet Explorer and it consists of a dropdown that includes the message "Translate this page" in the available languages.

Google's widget uses a machine translation system developed by Google, that's available for 29 language pairs. The widget works in most browsers and it's actually a Google gadget loaded in an iframe. What I don't like about this widget is that Google cares so much about its branding that it includes a logo for "Google Translate", a link to information about embeddable gadgets and an option to "get this gadget". Microsoft doesn't add any branding to the widget.

Even if it's not flawless, Google's translation system is more scalable and we should see more languages added in the future. And maybe there are better options than adding a translation widget to your page: a mechanism built in your browser that automatically translates all the web pages to your native language or to a language you know.

Googlified spotted a new feature in Google's image search engine that suggests refinements for your query. In the screenshot below, a search for [army] returned Google's suggestion to "also try: [us army]".

I was able to see the new option by adding &gl=us to a search URL, so it's likely that Google still tests it. The suggestions for image search are different than the ones usually displayed in a list of related searches at the bottom of a search results page. People usually want to find Nike's logo and only search for [Nike], want to see Greece's map and only search for [Greece] or only enter [1984] to find the cover of George Orwell's famous book, so a hint to try to a more precise query is helpful.

The feature is already available at Yahoo Image Search, where you'll also find a box of recommended searches at the bottom of the page: "others who searched for ... also searched for". Live Search shows a list of related people when you search for a famous person, like Natalie Portman.

The top queries in an image search engine are usually celebrity names. What other things do you try to find using these specialized search engines and what improvements would you like to see in the future?

It's strange to see that Gmail's mobile app still doesn't work with Google Apps accounts. The only option offered by Google is for Blackberry users: "if you currently use the Gmail for mobile application on your Blackberry, you'll need to download the mobile application for Google Apps as well. These are two different applications. A red M icon will appear for Gmail and a blue M icon will appear for Mail by Google (Google Apps)."

An interesting comment from a Lifehacker post offered a way to login with a Google Apps account in Gmail's mobile application, by downloading two old versions on your mobile phone:

* Browse to gmail.com/app/v1.0.0/en/gmail-g.jar [or: http://tinyurl.com/yxnuqx] and download the version 1.0 client

* After it installs select 'Keep existing data' on your phone when prompted

* Now when you start up gmail it will use the saved login credentials from the previous install and work just dandy.

I couldn't make this work, but others confirmed that this trick works (for example, in some Nokia and Windows Mobile phones). The latest version of Gmail Mobile is 1.5, so the two versions mentioned above aren't very recent.

One of the many weak points in Google Reader was that the feeds weren't updated very frequently. In fact, Google checked to see if there's any new item in a feed every 3 hours if a had a single subscriber, and every hour (or more often) for the rest of the feeds.

A more efficient way to update feeds is to use a ping mechanism. A lot of blog authoring tools send pings to specialized services every time someone creates a new post. Google Blog Search has a ping service, "a way to inform Google Blog Search of weblog updates. These updates are then published and shared with other search engines to allow them to discover the changes to your weblogs. In addition, Google Blog Search will add submitted weblogs to the list of blogs it needs to crawl and index."

I noticed that Google Reader's last update time is identical to the one from Blog Search. Apparently, Google Reader started to use the pings from Blog Search, so the updates will be much faster and you'll actually get the latest news right after they are posted.

Google Notebook was one of the few Google apps that we're not available from a mobile phone. Now you can go to http://google.com/notebook/m and find a HTML version of Google Notebook optimized for mobile phones. There's also a new notebook "Mobile notes" where you can add notes directly from the homepage.

The "Unfiled" notebook is a great way to access your bookmarks, but you can't add a new one from the mobile interface. Other limitations: there's no search option, you can't edit notes, add labels or change the settings.

Android, Google's mobile platform, is finally open to the developers. Now you can download the SDK and start to develop great applications in Java. Google launched a competition that offers $10 million awards for the most interesting apps (the biggest prize is quite significant: $275,000).

Note that "the Android SDK is being offered to the developer community on an Early Look basis. (...) Once the SDK reaches a more finished form, Google intends to release most of the components under the Apache v2.0 open source license."

* Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

This demo shows Android on two different phones and you can see all kinds of applications from the built-in browser to Google Maps and a 3D game like Quake. According to Google, "Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts".

Some screenshots from the SDK's emulator: the iPhone-like browser, the always-connected phone using XMPP, a small application for managing contacts and a local search in Google Maps.